Michael Northen
PIGS FLY
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The first place they appeared was the oak tree
foraging the acorns not yet fallen to the ground.
Next they were in the crooks of the splay-armed
tulip poplar and finally grunting in the pines
with voices like asthmatic snorers.
I stared, the wind tugging at my jacket
belief as rusted as the Chevy I climbed into.
No seraphim, their bodies were their bodies,
cumbersome, heavy-jowled, moving not like swifts
but ill at ease in the air
like the fantails and tumblers of childhood.
When the edges of my windshield
cropped them from the ordinary
I sat a full minute.
The ignition started on the first turn of the key.
ON A PHOTO BY ELI NORTHEN
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In the top left corner rice paper thin geese
are trying to rise above the frame.
They are only a nuance of the fog
whose anemia overlaid
with scuffed album marks tell us
that the mind from which those thoughts emerged
died long ago.
Dissemblance retrocedes to first appearance:
the stone church spectral,
the trees evaporating from their tips,
the still dark ground from which they all arise formless.
a few birds lag behind dissolving into gesture
(framed photo, photo frame, time frame, mind frame, frame of mind…)